Sister Girl (Part Two) by Stacey Gordon

How do we relate to one another when our tribal interactions and how we prepared our traditional foods were erased from our memory?

How do we heal as a collective culture when our history has been altered, our present deteriorated, and our future derailed upon a path that led to human indecency, and hundreds of years of bondage?
How do you heal from having your bloodline tainted, and the future of your youth hung on the end of a rope?
What did we genetically inherit from the rape and mixture of incessant genes, warped ideologies, and the forced culture of another heritage that sees you as one third property, one third beast, and one third person?

In our ugly past Sister Girl, men failed to protect you from our oppressors whom have become our historical enemies which is apparent in our current presidency, and the black lives matter movement.

Today we fail to protect you from the major pathologies in society.
We fail to protect you from single parenthood, from the horrors, regrets, and nightmares of abortion.
We fail to protect you from the overwhelming stress and heavy burdens of paying the bills while struggling daily to keep a roof over both your head and our children’s.

I Apologize
Sister Girl, I am terribly remorseful for you being forced to get public assistance which allows strangers to become interchangeable with your personal business compelling you to beg for hospitalization and food stamps, when as a man I should be providing for you and my children.
I apologize for not fighting for your emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual safety.

No woman should ever have to endure being sexually forced to give away what is both precious and priceless to thieves of the temple, those who wishes to steal a woman’s riches by severely wounding her spirit, and by dimming her light of courage and purpose.

I apologize for allowing our children to be abducted from their home and safe haven, to be sold or given to master’s next of kin.
Today, we are still allowing strangers…through children services, foster care, juvenile detention centers, prison, and gangs to take our children from their home.

Sister’s you deserve more than this!
I know personally that it’s a lot to overcome and to forgive me for. Yet instill I’m asking you to forgive me, I’m asking you to forgive us as black men collectively, in order for us to grow and overcome we need you Sister Girl.
I understand that it’ll take time, trust, and renewed faith. Yet, if we do not love one another and welcome the opportunity to be loved in return who else will uplift us in the spirit of negritude?
How can we return to greatness whereas we were pyramid builders, builders of civilizations, innovators, scientists, pharaoh’s, Kings, Queens, warriors, mathmeticians, inventors, High priest, and tribal chiefs.
I know that it seems like things are getting worse instead of getting better.
I know that as men we are filling up these modern day plantations called penitentiaries. We are unemployed in record number, we turned from our cultural women to other cultures looking for love. We have turned to unnatural relationships for companionships. We are on drugs and alcohol in unprecedented addictions. We are rapidly dying in the streets in gang wars and black on black crime.
We need you as nurses Sister Girl, we suffer from high blood pressure, heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Will you give us your legal advice? Your wise counsel, your physical therapy, your care giving, your menu of healthy organic foods, and your support as we grow into being what you need?

In retrospect, before the vile demoralizing, ostracizing, demonizing, discriminatory practices that affixed itself to us in slavery, and within the pride stripping labor of racial segregation.
We as men should have fought at every turn until our oppressors realized that the war against us was too costly to fight, and therefore they would either retreat from acts of hatred and racism and treat blacks as equal beings or we fight until death.

I apologize for not systematically rebelling against the practices of dehumanizing us, by refusing to work the fields, refusing to break wild horses, refusing to build homes we didn’t live in, refusing to be butchers, blacksmiths, stagecoach drivers, and refusing to allow our women to be midwives, to breast feed babies that were not ours, by refusing to be cooks, maids, menders and seamstresses.

We should have turned on our slave owners with solidarity and unity with the mentality that either we all perish together, or together we rise up from the conditions of inhumane treatment with victory and the experience to overcome against all odds!

What good is life, if life is defined as living apart from our God given freedom, apart from family, love, and away from our creative purpose?

Sister Girl, you have excelled at being grandmothers, mother’s, and wives.
Today, I need you to allow the black men to be men.
Don’t enable me by accepting me into your heart, home, or into your bed without my being responsible as a man.
Don’t pay my bills, don’t accept intimate partner violence, don’t accept cheating, and being exposed to life threatening diseases.
Don’t accept inexcusable weakness.
If I cannot be a man for a real woman then send me away to be a boy for a girl somewhere playing house.

Don’t accept me lying and using unwarranted excuses about why I’m unemployed, and why I’m not in school, or learning a trade, or why I’m living with my parents?

Don’t accept me using drugs to cop out on life, or to cope with everyday realities.
Don’t accept me not being a provider!
If a man doesn’t have personal direction, goals, resources, and a viable
plan …where can he lead you?
What values and work ethics can he instill into your children?

Sister Girl, I need you!

Stacey Gordon
DOC #r151-919